Milos Raonic Is on a Quest to Be the Best Tennis Player in the World

Milos Raonic is swiping through his phone. We’re in a booth at a Miami steak house, picking at shrimp-and-quinoa salads, talking about athletes and writing, when he finds Kobe Bryant’s retirement poem, a love letter to basketball. “You’re a writer,” he says to me. “I want to hear your literary take.” This is typical. Not so much the poetry part as the seeking-out opinions. Last year, while recovering from back spasms, the 25-year-old Canadian asked himself, “What is the stuff I like to do the least and can it help me?” One answer? Writing. Now every night Raonic, currently ranked seventh, jots down “ideas, emotions” in a leather notebook. He’s been reading books like The Art of Learning, by the chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin. Tennis is a game of slim margins, especially at the top. Every player is looking for that something to close the gap. Commentator Justin Gimelstob believes one of Raonic’s strengths is “he isn’t afraid to be great.”

When asked about his goals, Raonic doesn’t hesitate: “To win Grand Slams and be the number-one player in the world.” He’s getting close—in January he reached the semis of the Australian Open and the finals of Wimbledon this July. A year ago he climbed to number four, but two days later a surgeon was removing inflamed nerves from his feet. (“Congratulations,” Raonic jokes, “here’s some anesthesia.”) Hampered by injury, he slid to fourteen.

In May Raonic hired John McEnroe to join his coaching team, which already includes former world number-one Carlos Moya. McEnroe’s grass-court expertise and legendary volleys complement Raonic’s game, though some initially wondered about the fit between these two seemingly opposite personalities. Raonic believes the expressive McEnroe can help him see himself from the other side of the court: “how I make my opponents feel and to manipulate that.” It’s a partnership as much about the mind as the net.

At their first tournament together, at London’s Queen’s Club, Raonic reached the finals, narrowly losing to Andy Murray in three sets. Two and a half weeks later Raonic defeated Roger Federer in five sets in the Wimbledon semis to reach his inaugural Grand Slam final, the first Canadian man to do so. Murray triumphed again in the championship match, but Raonic’s two-week performance at the All England Club, including his first win after being down two sets to love, was a major breakthrough.

Born in Montenegro in 1990, Raonic moved to the Toronto area with his family at age four. His father, Dusan, first enrolled his son in a tennis clinic when he was seven. He paid a local club $200 a month so they could have a court and ball machine every day at 6:00 a.m. and ten at night. Two years later they went to see coach Casey Curtis. “He had a determined look in his eyes,” Curtis says, “and he had a live arm.” They would end up working together for eight years. Dusan and his wife, Vesna, are engineers. They imagined a college scholarship—but a pro athlete? Yet Milos loved the game, and by the time he was twelve, Curtis believed he’d developed the best service motion in the world.

Now Raonic stands six feet five inches tall. He weighs between 210 and 220 pounds. When serving he makes contact with the ball at almost inhuman height. His fastest serve on record is 155.3 mph. Sometimes the only way a player can return it is to stick out his racket and guess. “It’s not a way to start the point,” Raonic says of his serve. “It’s a way to finish it.”

When I ask Raonic for adjectives to describe his serve he says, “Accurate. Intimidating. And—what’s a word for hard to read?”

“Unpredictable?”

“Unpredictable.” Then he scratches that. “Unpredictable makes it sound like I don’t know where it’s going.”

Sometimes, though, all that physical force can turn on him. He lost some momentum during the clay season earlier this year as he dealt with small injuries and the slower courts. But with two former number-ones in his coaching box and the experience of being a Wimbledon runner-up, he’s ready for the North American hard court season and the U.S. Open.

Raonic’s peers regard him as one of the hardest workers on tour. But he’s come to understand he can improve his game by sometimes stepping away from it. In Miami he drove over to the Wynwood neighborhood to see the graffiti walls. Pinterest became “a little obsession” for design ideas for his new place in New York. At home he occasionally breaks his diet with his girlfriend, the model Danielle Knudson, at Harlem’s Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.

Does this help his quest to be the best? “He’s going to maximize everything he’s got,” says former player Patrick McEnroe. “For any athlete—or any person—that’s all you can ask.”